leories 



SCIENTIFIC SIDE-LIGHTS 



634 



is also certain that we might begin earlier, 

 and find germs which are destroyed by a 

 temperature far below that of boiling water. 

 In the presence of such facts, to speak of 

 a death-point of bacteria and their germs 

 would be unmeaning. TYNDALL Floating 

 Matter of the Air, essay 5, p. 307. (A., 

 1895.) 



3383. TEXTILES OF PRIMITIVE 



MAN Early Patterns the Despair of Modern 

 Imitators. The cotton-gin and power- loom 

 are among the wonders of our age. Yet in 

 that [primitive] day human fingers wrought 

 the textile from first to last. They gathered 

 the bark or wool, colored them to suit the 

 primitive taste, spun and wove them with 

 simple apparatus, and left upon the fabric 

 patterns that are the despair of all modern 

 machine-makers patterns that are a pleas- 

 ure to the eye by their infinite variety, re- 

 placed in modern fabrics by a dreary mon- 

 otony that awakens pain instead of pleasure. 

 MASON The Birth of Invention (Address 

 at Centenary of American Patent System, 

 Washington, D. C., 1891, Proceedings of the 

 Congress, p. 408). 



3384. THEOLOGY, ACCEPTANCE OF, 

 READY MAD E Spiritual Parasitism. 

 There are still large numbers whose only 

 contact with religion is through theological 

 forms. ... If the greatest minds of 

 the church's past, having exercised them- 

 selves profoundly upon the problems of 

 religion, formulated as with one voice a 

 system of doctrine, why should the humble 

 inquirer not gratefully accept it? Why go 

 over the ground again? Why with his dim 

 light should he betake himself afresh to 

 Bible study, and with so great a body of 

 divinity already compiled presume himself 

 to be still a seeker after truth? Does not 

 theology give him Bible truth in reliable, 

 convenient, and, moreover, in logical propo- 

 sitions? There it lies extended to the last 

 detail in the tomes of the fathers, or 

 abridged in a hundred modern compendiums, 

 ready made to his hand, all cut and dry, 

 guaranteed sound and wholesome, why not 

 use it ? 



Just because it is all cut and dry. Just 

 because it is ready made. Just because it 

 lies there in reliable, convenient, and logical 

 propositions. The moment you appropriate 

 truth in such a shape you appropriate a 

 form. You cannot cut and dry truth. You 

 cannot accept truth ready made without it 

 ceasing to nourish the soul as truth. You 

 cannot live on theological forms without 

 becoming a parasite and ceasing to be a 

 man. DRUMMOND Natural Law in the Spir- 

 itual World, essay 10, p. 323. (H. Al.) 



3385. THEOLOGY, ANCIENT, OP- 

 POSED TO SCIENCE Bruno Burned by In- 

 quisition Galileo's Recantation. If the 

 neighboring stars are placed at tens and 

 hundreds of billions of miles from us, it is 

 at quadrillions, at quintillions of miles that 



most of the stars lie which are visible in the 

 sky in telescopic .fields. What suns! What 

 splendors ! Their light comes from such dis- 

 tances ! And it is these distant suns which 

 human pride would like to make revolve 

 round our atom; and it was for our eyes 

 that ancient theology declared these lights, 

 invisible without a telescope, were created! 

 It was because the philosophical astronomer, 

 Giordano Bruno, asserted these distant suns 

 to be centers of other systems that the In- 

 quisition caused him to be burned alive at 

 Rome before the terrified people; and it was 

 because Galileo persisted in maintaining 

 that our planet is subject to the sun, and 

 that that body is itself but a star lost in 

 infinitude, that this same Inquisition or- 

 dered him under pain of death to kneel be- 

 fore the Gospels (Church of Minerva at 

 Rome, June 22, 1633) and abjure the truth 

 which his conscience believed! FLAMMARI- 

 ON Popular Astronomy, bk. vi, ch. 5, p. 601. 

 (A.) 



3386. THEOLOGY THE HIGHEST 

 SCIENCE Would Naturally Be Last to Reach 

 Perfection. Theology continues to be con- 

 sidered, as it has always been, a thing apart. 

 It remained still a stupendous and splendid 

 construction, but on lines altogether its own. 

 Nor is theology to be blamed for this. Na- 

 ture has been long in speaking; even yet 

 its voice is low, sometimes inaudible. Sci- 

 ence is the true defaulter, for theology had 

 to wait patiently for its development. As 

 the highest of the sciences, theology in the 

 order of evolution should be the last to fall 

 into rank. It is reserved for it to perfect the 

 final harmony. DRUMMOND Natural Law in 

 the Spiritual World, int., p. 15. (H. AL) 



3387. THEORIES ABANDONED BY 

 GREAT SCIENTIST Newton Undetermined 

 as to Nature of Gravitation. At the time, 

 . . . that Newton recognized all move- 

 ments of the cosmical bodies to be the re- 

 sults of one and the same force, he did not, 

 like Kant, regard gravitation as an essential 

 property of bodies, but considered it either 

 as the result of some higher and still un- 

 known power, or of " the centrifugal force 

 of aether, which fills the realms of space, and 

 is rarer within bodies, but increases in den- 

 sity outward." The latter view is set forth 

 in detail in a letter to Robert Boyle (dated 

 February 28, 1678), which ends with the 

 words, " I seek the cause of gravity in the 

 aether." Eight years afterward, as we learn 

 from a letter he wrote to Halley, Newton 

 entirely relinquished this hypothesis of the 

 rarer and denser ether. It is especially 

 worthy of notice that in 1717, nine years 

 before his death, he should have deemed 

 it necessary expressly to state, in the short 

 preface to the second edition of his " Op- 

 tics," that he did not by any means consider 

 gravity as an " essential property of bod- 

 ies"; while Gilbert, as early as 1600, re- 

 garded magnetism as a force inherent in all 

 matter. So undetermined was even Newton, 





